


Legion

by ultranos



Category: Stargate SG-1
Genre: Character Study, Episode Tag, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-14
Updated: 2008-05-14
Packaged: 2017-10-15 14:53:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ultranos/pseuds/ultranos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"'What is your name?'  'My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many.'" (Mark 5:9)</i></p><p>(set immediately post-"Gemini")</p>
            </blockquote>





	Legion

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [](http://shanghairain.livejournal.com/profile)[**shanghairain**](http://shanghairain.livejournal.com/) for the quick once-over editing job. If it sucks, it's my fault, not his. Also, [](http://abyssinia4077.livejournal.com/profile)[**abyssinia4077**](http://abyssinia4077.livejournal.com/)? This one's for you.

She didn't break until she got home.

She would not accept the awkward absolution that the General and Teal'c offered her. She stayed in her lab until she couldn't take concrete walls and metal lab benches anymore and fled the mountain for the safety of the outside world. Someplace where nanotechnology was still mostly theoretical and couldn't walk up to you and throw you across the room.

All she wanted was to get into the shower and scrub it all away. Scrub until it hurt. Pain. The harder she scrubbed, the more it would hurt. Cause and effect. Quantitative results, reproducible under the correct conditions. Here, things obeyed physical laws, and maybe Sam could convince herself that the other was not her.

She made the mistake of turning around.

Staring out from the other side of the sink was her. The other. Her double, crafted out of infinitesimal robots to take the form of her image. The other, who knew Sam better than anyone else, who knew all the lies Sam told herself, all the little secrets she kept hidden away.

She stared at the image, searching that familiar face for anything that could be different. And found nothing. Almost of its own volition, her hand reached out and touched the face in front of her. Her fingers hit the coolness of the glass, so reminiscent of metal that she immediately flinched and withdrew her hand.

Scared of her own reflection.

Angles and numbers floated in her mind, physical laws of the behavior of light, for once not offering comfort in their explanations. Light and its confounding dual nature, pieces and a whole, showing her that which she did not wish to see in a smooth sheet of glass. Daniel had once told her that people used to believe that mirrors reflected the soul, so that breaking one was tantamount to fracturing your soul.

Once upon a time, her mother made sure both her children attended Mass every Sunday. She remembered very little from those hours sitting in a church. She stopped going when her mother died.

In her mind, bound by the pain of the hand in her head, the Replicator had smirked.

 _My name is Legion, for we are many._

The echoes of the priest from her childhood whispered from the artificial lips of her double, mocking, all around her. In this place, there was no God, there was nothing to drive this demon from her.

Because she was the demon and the demon was she. She could lie to herself, others would offer false platitudes, but the lies echoed in her brain. The only one who could lie to Sam Carter was Sam Carter. And now, not even then. Her double had ripped the blinders away, and now all she could see was the truth, stark, bright, and cold: there was nothing to the copy that wasn't in the original, somewhere. Intertwined and inseparable, now and forever.

 _My name is Legion, for we are many._

Jolinar stole her body. The replicator stole her soul.

 _My name is Legion._

What part was left that was still Sam Carter? Every time she walked through the 'gate, her molecules got rearranged and spat back out. Even that stole tiny parts of her. What was left, what else could they take?

Her double stared back at her.

 _My name is--_

Sam's fist impacted with the mirror. The sound of shattering glass drowned out the soft splats of blood dripping onto the floor.


End file.
